Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

It wasn't until 1987 that the American Academy of Pediatrics explicitly recommended giving babies pain relief during surgical procedures. 1987!(!!!) Why? Parental outrage, initially kicked off by a mother whose infant received *open heart surgery* with no pain management.

Did all of these medical professionals really believe that babies felt no pain? How confident were they? Did they think about it often? How could they bring themselves to cut into tiny children, fully awake but paralyzed by muscle relaxants? Do they feel any guilt *now*?

Sometimes it seems utterly insane to me that educational professionals can look at a typical classroom and think "yes, this is what a childhood ought to be." But it's not insane. It's a standard feature of humans to be this recklessly unobservant when it suits you.

It might not be so much self-interest as sheer inertia.

Culture is a helluva drug

The net effect is conscripting seven year olds to “normie meme prison” (in the words of @CTZN5) for six hours/day and drugging them if they’re not excited by that

Inertia is the default for the individual, but preventing progress across a population in the long term is actually pretty difficult. Culture can run interference, but without top-down control over information, it’s unclear for how long